The Lotus/Workplace independent consultant market

May 8 2005

Several bloggers (Carl Tyler, vowe, Brian Benz and others) seem to have created or picked up a meme over the weekend that there's dwindling business for independent Notes/Domino or IBM Workplace consulting, and that therefore these products are in market decline (on the Notes side) or lacking demand (on the Workplace side).
Volker Weber:

IBM has scared customers by making too much noise about unproven technology.
Carl Tyler, in reference to people like Rocky taking permanent gigs instead of consulting:
I keep hearing of people leaving their Domino consulting companies to go back to full time work somewhere.
Brian Benz offers some balance:
I for one still work with Domino every day, among other things, but decided that it was in my best interest to give up my consulting "company" (just me anyway) and take a full-time position at a organization here in Las Vegas.  I miss some aspects of consulting, but life is more stable now.  I'm sure a lot of talented people were in my situation, or worse, who moved away from the Notes and Domino world, never to return.

In the end the technology needs people to make it go, or the community just caves in like an unoccupied house.  Some of the damage done during those dark days is simply irreparable.  I hope lessons were learned at IBM, but I'm not so sure.  I worry that some people who should have been very publicly fired for the damage they caused to the market over the regrettable things they did and said still hold prominent positions of power at IBM, and could still do some damage (Why, oh why, couldn't Microsoft lure THEM away?)
So, here's my take:
  • The Notes/Domino product line exist in a mature market.  There are already 60,000 companies running this infrastructure -- meaning, there have been tens of thousands of consulting contracts in the past to architect and deploy those environments.  Now that the growth rate is slower -- a few thousand new companies per year -- there are fewer architecture/implementation contracts.  Also, Notes/Domino 6.x has been out for more than 2.5 years, and the vast majority of Notes customers have upgraded (though I painfully watched someone using Notes R5 on a flight back from Texas last week...).  Companies are still building/deploying new Notes applications, but the rate and pace of overall IT investment has slowed across the board -- not just in Notes applications.  Even with all those factors, there are plenty of consultancies indicating that they are flush with work.  I suspect they are the ones that are too busy to have commented on blog threads over a weekend :)
  • The individual decisions of people like Rocky and Brian and others to seek permanent positions reflects individual choice -- not necessarily a trend, especially given how some of these high-profile members of the Lotus community ended up in their new situations.
  • The IBM Workplace market is still emerging.  Workplace Designer hasn't shipped yet.  The 2.5 unified Collaborative Services release is coming soon, but not out yet.  There is still maturing to be done here.  There is already market opportunity, though.  IBM has hundreds of partners working with the Workplace platform already, and a large number of customers in proof-of-concept, pilot, or deployment.  The (internal only, sorry) status reports I receive weekly tell me exactly who is doing what with Workplace -- and some of it is really exciting stuff.  I think you'll see more through 2005 and beyond.  To be clear, this is a more nascent market and platform -- and the ramp-up is necessarily long for both technology and market maturity.  I think 2.5's imminent release will renew and create interest in the Workplace back-end -- especially as the Workplace Managed Client becomes tighter with Notes 7 and beyond.
My blogdigger RSS feeds show me new Notes/Domino jobs in the US almost every single day, from Sparks, Nevada to Hopewell, New Jersey.  I think there are other geographies with similar demand.  The Workplace back-end isn't there yet, but with the kind of efforts IBM is putting into building the product family, I believe it will be, soon.

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [33]

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  1. 1  Vince Schuurman http://blog.vinceschuurman.com | 5/9/2005 3:20:07 AM

    I don't see a declining market in the Netherlands....

    On the contrary, although there is not much work for small development firms at the moment, I haven't seen so many requests for on site contractors in years.

  1. 2  Wild Bill (for it is he - not some lame anonymous troller!) http://www.billbuchan.com/web.nsf/htdocs/BBUN693HVL.htm | 5/9/2005 3:32:10 AM

    Ah - well, my market is declining - primarily because I choose not to work for IBM consulting anymore (after their last complete screwup). IBM has been my most consistent customer since 1995 - so obviously I'm finding more difficult than most.

    So whilst I'm finding it difficult getting "good" and "well paid" work, I'd agree that there's lots out there. My quarterly jobserve stats for the notes market in the uk (I'll do one soon) does indicate a strong resurgence in the Domino market compared to last winter, or god forbid - 2001.

    However, one incredibly blinkered and/or uninformed sycophanitc Softie blogger took this to mean that getting Notes consultants would be difficult in the near future. I mean - this is way off the scale in terms of being wrong. But hey - each to our own (possibly incredibly stupid) opinion.

    ---* Bill

  1. 3  Ben Poole http://www.benpoole.com | 5/9/2005 4:04:20 AM

    Not having any experience as a consultant, my yard-stick is simply looking at Notes-related jobs on Monster, Workthing, Jobserve, cwjobs. etc., etc. My observations over the past couple of years are:

    (a) Notes-related jobs in the UK are on the definite increase and;

    (b) these jobs are entry-level, usually in helpdesk and administrator roles, rather than development.

  1. 4  Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 5/9/2005 5:13:38 AM

    The jobs are out there, but the high level jobs are rarer.

    This is partly because they're already taken, to be honest. I worked for a small consultancy from 1998 - 2002, and I can assure you that during the boom we did a lot of rollouts. There was hot competition for deploying mail systems, as everyone wanted to get on the net. A boom time for everyone, and probably the time when Exchange threatened Domino/Notes the most - because Exchange's edge is in the SMB sector, especially with the boost it gets from being in the SBS package.

    Then came the 2000-2002 tech crash. That hit deployments hard. Nobody wanted to spend money on IT systems. That includes employment, not just the technology.

    If the job market's dry, it's because the cream's already risen to the top during those hardest times. Companies are now looking at re-investing, but for a potential jobseeker that's not much to console them - companies that invest in technology like Domino often have their own in-house development team, or at the very least a guru or two. As budget is still tight (if at last available!), a reliance on internal resourcing is more likely. And contractors are out of favour to offshorers, who are even cheaper - companies are now polarising between the "In-house, pay they, keep them, reap the fringe benefits" camp and the "external, cheap, disposable, we see no fringe benefits" camp. Contractors - especially developers - are no longer competing against people in the same city, and I'll bet more development project tenders are being advertised in India than anywhere else...

    Interestingly, this theory also neatly accounts for the higher proportion of Domino installations that are on the current codestream. Again, Domino houses tend to view it as an investment - and a mission critical one at that. Lots of Exchange installations are in that SMB environment, and the boss just doesn't see why he should upgrade. It sends and recieves email, doesn't it? Then why does it need replacing so soon? This desk and chair are a decade old, and still work fine! (That's a quote, by the way - someone actually saw it that way...)

    I have friends who do contracting for small businesses - the <100 employees sector - and they report that for Exchange. Nobody's upgrading in that sector until they absolutely have to, because the costs are viewed as too high. (This is why I'm "evangelically upset" that Domino/Notes doesn't have a higher presence in the low-end of the market, but not actually upset after having thought about it. Domino/Notes just isn't well suited to the way those sectors work, because they're far less likely to invest in extending it. They want "plug and play", and don't care about adaptability or extendability.)

    If you were an Exchange consultant, I'm not sure you'd see much more activity than for Domino, until everyone wakes up and realises that their current install is about to be obseleted... And maybe not even then, because many small companies don't watch the market the way we do!

    Executive summary of this long reply (which should really be in my blog...):

    This is a reflection of a mature, stable marketplace and the way in which the deployments of Domino are used. It's not something to worry about strategically, although it can obviously be something which worries us personally as they are, after all, our jobs and our futures!

    Of course, all this is just my theory. I may be wrong. :-)

  1. 5  Axel Janssen  | 5/9/2005 6:41:52 AM

    I am actually surprised how much coding days I make this year with maintaining/adding_new_features to existing domino apps.

    This jobs show clearly the importance of sound software development practices.

    In my view, apps around year 2000 were often coded in a not sophisticated way. There could have been more effort from Lotus to evangelize such practices. For example there are excelent books I recommend on a national notes forum called "Code Complete" and "Rapid Application Development". But this is only a start. Why there were never anti-patterns of Domino development published? In my view Lotus has ridden to much this easy-breezy-don't-worry RAD horse. This has fostered a bad coding practice among not few of the coders. Customer can't distinguish who is the bad guy: Lotus, initial coder or maintainer.

    Also J2EE (openSores and commercial) and .NET (which are in many points similar) are making huge inroads in classical Domino territory like workflow or disconnected working with shared data.

    A lot of customers are complaining about the evil kids of Lotus (LEI, DWF and LISA). There are issues which doesn't strengthen the confidence of users of those products in Lotus.

    For a lot of tasks Lotus is still a good platform, provided you have coder who knows what he is doing. But other platforms are catching up and taking lead.

    In my view a big part of the domino community (not all) is to autofocussed and just have zero interest about what is happening on other platforms.

    With workplace Lotus appears again to toot loudly about rapid application development. In my view this is not all. To provide reliable service to customer you have to understand the system. Not only know how to code some training style app. As software developers we take a lot of risk, problems arise and we have to know how to help ourselves. You can only help yourself, if you understand huge part of the system you develop on. And Lotus Workplace is big elephant to eat.

  1. 6  Ed Maloney  | 5/9/2005 6:48:41 AM

    Let's not forget the outsourcing trend... CSC and many others have sent contract Domino development out of the country. This has displaced US developers, forcing down wages for both consultants and FTEs. I know of several large Notes shops in the Boston area that have already sent Domino development to India. Sadly, there are rumors that another large Cambridge employer is about to do the same.

    That said, I believe that there is some urgency in IBM shipping the Workplace Designer and a version of Workplace that traditional Notes developers can adopt quickly.

  1. 7  Axel Janssen  | 5/9/2005 6:56:33 AM

    @6: Isn't it actually a good trend of our times that often very skilled developers from poorer countries can participate in the global market economy?

    Have you ever lived for some time in a developing country with market oriented system? I know Chile and India should be similar in a way. I wish them all the best.

    Its not sad. Its a good thing of our time. :-)

  1. 8  Carl Tyler http://www.iminstant.com | 5/9/2005 7:37:31 AM

    I'd like to point out my posting did not make a judgement, it just asked the question if this migration back to full time status for a number of partners was an inidcation of something going on, I suppose the demise of e-Pro could also be thrown into the question.

  1. 9  Jas  | 5/9/2005 9:03:39 AM

    All,

    I do agree a lot of working is being out sourced to India, not just Domino but all technologies. I agree with with Alex, @7. But I also get alerts from UK job sites and surely there is an increase there too, but not much development work.

    Its surely the best thing of our times that people from countries like India are getting a fair deal too. Its about time .....

    Any any help getting a job here in India, do let me know :) .... that would be true out sourcing ..... Jas, from sunny India

  1. 10  Rock http://www.lotusgeek.com | 5/9/2005 10:13:48 AM

    Well, since my ears are burining with all of you talking about me, I thought I would post my response to this as a blog entry. Read it here:

    { Link }

    --Rock

  1. 11  Duffbert http://www.twduff.com | 5/9/2005 10:30:43 AM

    @5... Off-topic, but it's driving me crazy...

    The correct spelling is "open source", not "open Sores". "Open Sores" would be festering wounds on the body that haven't healed.

    Now, back to the topic at hand...

    :-)

  1. 12  Craig Wiseman  | 5/9/2005 10:37:12 AM

    @11 I'm thinking they use the near-homonyms "source" and "sores" intentionly, as part of the ongoing FUD campaign against it.

  1. 13  Craig Wiseman  | 5/9/2005 10:39:42 AM

    @12 Yes, my precious, Theys is out to gets us, they is.

    <gollum, gollum>

  1. 14  Eric Parsons startingblockcomputing.com | 5/9/2005 10:45:55 AM

    "The Workplace back-end isn't there yet, but with the kind of efforts IBM is putting into building the product family, I believe it will be, soon."

    In general, I hope you are very very wrong here, as I know that Domino is a great product. Way too many executives will read the above quote as "Time to move away from Domino." Workplace seems to be a good product, but in my experience, it is not the easiest thing to install and get working stable.

    I guess my bottom line is, can we quit uttering these in the same breath as they are two great products that should stand on their own feet?

  1. 15  Mike Lazar  | 5/9/2005 10:52:06 AM

    First, I'll have to say I made a very similar decision to Brian's about 18 months ago. I stopped consulting (other than the occassional weekend/evening gig for old customers) and took a full-time job with a service provider. The market for high level consulting had dried up completely outside of government work, and wondering when the next payday would be got to grow quite old. That in turn led to the soul searching of, "What will happen in 5 years if Domino is gone, I don't want to do this anymore, I get hurt, etc...". I decided it was time to get a job with benefits, paid holidays, training, all of those things.

    Now that I am a practice director for a service provider, I see things from another side. The market for Domino consulting is not what it was, but it is moving again. Admin work (upgrades, consolidations, etc.) are not vulnerable to the off-shoring that development is. That work is much more difficult to do remotely and customers want to have the people in charge of it nearby. The market for Domino out-tasking is growing very rapidly. Many enterprises 1,000 seats and up are looking to get rid of the day-to-day maintenance/operations of their systems. They are looking to have a service provider take care of that for them for a set monthly fee and true SLAs. Focusing on core competencies and the like is the mantra of the day. This is indicitive of a mature market, along the lines of networks and phone systems. On the contrary, an emerging technology such as Workplace currently does not have much of an out-tasking market. We have received a few vague inquiries, but our customers are not lining up to migrate their initial pilot Workplace implementations to a service provider. I did an initial study on the marketplace, and for 2005 we had to table Workplace as a standard offering. There just isn't enough interest...yet. I'm hopeful to be ahead of the curve and have a product in place for 2006, based on a large implementation we are doing for a customer very soon. One-off solutions are usually the precursor to commercialized offerings. Or so I hope in this case. Sorry for the long, boring post!

  1. 16  Axel Janssen  | 5/9/2005 10:54:59 AM

    @11, @12:

    Also out of topic. And my last statement on this.

    Won't use this word anymore.

    But why those emotional reactions. Its all business after all.

    I am actually using and playing with a lot of openSource stuff. Actually springframework, posgreSQL, ibatis, hibernate, jboss, tomcat, axis, jakarta commons, struts, tapestry, JORAM, etc.

    In bile blog its spelled that way and author of this blog is the developer of a succesful openSource workflow framework on openSymphony. And so I thought it would be ok.

    Heck. I might even be a commiter, but up to now no project has accepted me as one. :-)

  1. 17  Craig Wiseman  | 5/9/2005 10:55:53 AM

    @11,5 Except for Axel...

  1. 18  Axel Janssen  | 5/9/2005 11:11:51 AM

    in the end, maybe all this pressure against Lotus in those forums and stuff will be beneficial.

    Could be that that there'll be an extra effort to straighten development process, take customer demands serious, etc.

    we don't know.

  1. 19  Brian Benz http://www.softwaresoapbox.com | 5/9/2005 11:38:04 AM

    OK, I'll chime in....

    I can't speak for others, but the "maturing market" is a great way to describe my personal situation. Perhaps for others too. As I said in my post, I chose full time work for stability. Why is that so important when it wasn't before? Simple: I'm aging. My one-man consulting business was nowhere near what I planned for at this stage of my life, so I had to consider alternatives.

    Do I have regrets? Yes, some. I don't have time to write or speak anymore, and there's no budget here for travel to Lotusphere, etc. On the other hand, my wife and I get to spend some time together, which is hard to do when you're out of town on assignment every week. It turns out we like each other's company, which is a big relief :). And we can plan ahead a little, a rare luxury if you have a one-man consulting company.

    Perhaps taking on full time work is the professional equivalent of marriage vs. bachelorhood. You miss some things, but there are compensatory factors, depending on what you value, the choice is usually pretty clear. It would be interesting to track the ages of the prominent Notes geeks "making the switch". If they're around my age, I'll bet that was a factor....

  1. 20  Stefan Heinz http://www.bnotes.de | 5/9/2005 12:08:17 PM

    well, does anyone know about other markets like Exchange, Oracle, general Java development stuff? Anybody from a totally different market reading this and can say anything?

    As far as I'm concerned (BP in Munich, Germany since 1997), I had great times where I didn't need to do any marketing and almost every quote turned into a contract. Lotus (at the time it was called that) was a big customer of mine (they don't do any Domino work anymore with contractors).

    Yes, there used to be less work (the last 3 years).

    Yes, it seems to pick up again - a bit.

    Yes, it's by far not so easy anymore. :-(

    Yes, I'd like it to be easier to get new contracts :-)

    ... and yes, I'd like to get a new Thinkpad and to have more time to explore new technologies :-)

  1. 21  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 5/9/2005 12:25:39 PM

    @14 - Notes/Domino is PART of the Workplace product family... my statement about Workplace maturity is to the whole of the family, not just the Workplace Collaborative Services. It shouldn't be either/or anymore...

  1. 22  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 5/9/2005 12:33:43 PM

    On technical tems that would be like saying that Windows is part of the OS/2 product family. It runs inside ... :-)

  1. 23  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 5/9/2005 12:42:12 PM

    There is more integration between Notes within the Workplace client technology and the Workplace client overall than there was between the Win-OS/2 "compatibility box" and OS/2 itself. This was the point I was trying to make with Mr. Reeves a few weeks ago -- we're doing things like allowing Notes-within-WCT to use either a "Sametime" IM environment or a Workplace Collab Svcs IM environment. Just one example. Eventually, Notes will become a federated client within Workplace -- not just talking to Domino, but all sorts of back-end apps and services.

  1. 24  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 5/9/2005 12:51:00 PM

    Are you sure? You were talking about Windows and DOS with Mr. Reeves.

    There was actually a lot of integration between Windows (a market leader) and OS/2 (not really a market leader outside of Germany). Like Clipboard, DDE and quite a few more things that would be worth mentioning.

  1. 25  Axel Janssen  | 5/9/2005 11:40:02 PM

    @24 Internet discussions are full of comparisions of the type "Domino relates to Workplace like WindowsInOS2 to OS/2. It does not bring us any further (except the OS/2 not really a market leader outside of Germany, which is good one :-) ).

    There might be similarities in 3 or 4 aspects, but those integrations are different and can't be compared.

    Though I am not the world greatest Workplace zealot, I say that the complete overhaul of the technological basis of a product succesful for >10 years was necesary and good one.

    Compared to the newer kids of the same class Domino became more and more a specialized product. In my understanding IBM just does not have enough ressources to code same services and same quality of services which is build in J2EE stack from a lot of companies/openSource projects in a way together.

    I am no collaborative enterprise product developer but an application developer. Nevertheless in both fields the phenomen of technology-entropy and hard-to-work-with-legacy code might exist. So after >10 years the renovation of the underlying platform was a good move not without risks, but it was phreaky fundamentally necesary in the medium/long run.

  1. 26  Nathan T. Freeman  | 5/10/2005 3:27:08 AM

    "Are you sure? You were talking about Windows and DOS with Mr. Reeves."

    Is Volker getting on the "secret IBM plan" bandwagon now?

  1. 27  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 5/10/2005 4:55:27 AM

    Nathan, step off that "you are either with or against us" bandwagon. ;-)

  1. 28  Nathan T. Freeman  | 5/10/2005 9:25:21 AM

    Yes, Volker, I've never been critical of IBM. *eye roll*

    Look, I just don't get the constant presumptions that IBM is lying about their development plans with regard to Notes/Workplace and what they mean together. Yes, there are precedents to IBM shooting itself in the foot with a Howitzer, but those same precedents exist for many other vendors as well. I just don't get the purpose of presuming they're BSing unless it's just to generate antagonism.

  1. 29  Axel Janssen  | 5/10/2005 10:20:11 AM

    Now we all love Geronimo. :-)

  1. 30  Carl Tyler http://www.iminstant.com | 5/10/2005 1:56:42 PM

    @28 I believe the people that are making these statements are being 100% honest and sincere, I personally am not sure I believe the people above them who are telling these people what to say in order to make their statements :-D

    Usual Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion and not one of my company, anyone I hang out with, passed on the street or drank beer with etc. etc.

  1. 31  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 5/11/2005 6:33:53 AM

    Nathan, you got the point. It's not a good idea to put somebody else into a "camp".

  1. 32  Cathy Collins  | 7/28/2005 12:33:25 PM

    OK, as a person looking for resumes for independent domino web developers, I've run across several sites stating the consultant market isn't good - YET, I can't seem to find any domino web developer resumes to look at!!! Maybe if there was a centralized area for contractor resumes THAT I DIDN'T HAVE TO PAY TO JOIN, and was kept up-to-date, it would be easier for people like me to find someone to do some contract work.

    Just a thought from a frustrated Domino Administrator looking for a proven domino web developer (independent consultant), in NJ area. :-(

    C